The X-Spot: Year Fourteen

(Sigh!)

I leave cyberspace for a year, and look what happens: a contentious US Presidential and Senate election, violence in the street, economic hardship, a seriously inept coup attempt, and, oh yeah, a global pandemic.

A lot has occurred since I last posted.  I must confess that if writing about 2020 in situ I might have added my own passions into the mix. Polemics have never been my strong, though.  So this respite has given me some time to look into and reflect a bit about where my country, and her Western allies, sit at present.  Over the course of the past twelve months, many have cited failures in American politics as evidence that democracy is weak, and can never survive a strong man, or forceful minority.

If you’re conspiratorially minded (and who isn’t, these days) you might imagine a scenario in which ex-KGB, still smarting over the demise of the Soviet Union, have longed for comeuppance.  Maybe they’re getting their vengeance  by advocating the kind of nationalism that jeopardizes international trade, military and legal treaties among western allies. Perhaps they’re getting a kick out installing puppet leaders in the White House or at 10 Downing Street.

Of course, if you’re not so conspiratorially minded, you still might hold a more refined, yet similar opinion.  As former Foreign Minister Philip Hammond said about Brexit in a 2 March 2016 Parliament speech:

 

Some have said we should focus our attention on deals with the Anglosphere and the Commonwealth. But the EU already either has, or is negotiating, trade deals with all the biggest Commonwealth countries, and none of our allies wants us to leave the EU. Not Australia, not New Zealand, not Canada, not the US. In fact, the only country who would like us to leave the EU is Russia. That should tell us all we need to know.

It’s tempting to blame Russia for the political turmoil faced by the West during the last four years, just as it’s tempting to blame China for coronavirus, or both for the lousy weather we’ve been having lately.  But the truth is, the bulk of this peril is most likely self-inflicted.  We’ve seen the marketing of politics since Nixon’s Southern Strategy, an inducement to brand loyalty based on the overriding (but rarely outwardly stated) fear of racial annihilation.  We see the fruition of this post-Civil Rights Act apprehension in a wide array of cultural phenomena: from the rise of the Proud Boys, to the scorning of “political correctness” as a national threat, to the elevation by some of former US President Donald Trump to quasi-mythic stature.   

Dr.  Richard Hofstader used the term “status anxiety” to describe this true fear lighting a fire under this segment of American voters.  Indeed status anxiety might be worth exploring a bit later.

Of course the neo-fascist movement wasn’t the only entity viewing Trump as a savior or demigod.  His endorsement by those identifying as fundamentalist Christians never wavered despite a litany of exposed moral failings of the monetary and sexual type.  But now, there’s a new player in town, QAnon, who has cast the Donald, and everything he signifies to them, into an epic legend that surpasses even biblical proportions.  Their activism stems from a firm belief in the concept of imperium in imperio, a real issue pondered on and expressed by institutional actors and responsible, reasonable researchers.  The question here lies in the evidentiary basis, or lack thereof, of their over-arching narrative.  As a consequence, one can argue that some within the very power nexus they oppose have easily exploited them by stoking their own status anxiety, projecting it onto a dystopian vision of representational government.    

Why do I say this?

Because it’s happened before in these here United States.  And I’m not just talking “conspiracy theory” here.  This is a case officially recognized as a conspiracy.